Children of Anger ~ the rage in fighting modern diseases

This is a report any self-respecting man should read to fend the anger against all these modern pressures that victimize us simple folk with the poor excuse for nutrition that they serve us in processed foods rolling off the industrialized-agriculture assembly line.

We all have our individual hang-ups, but we all, collectively, suffer from issues of health, and the anger starts there!

So, Read this, and be enlightened:

Study: Soy Fights Prostate Cancer

The interest level in natural and complementary treatments for cancer has never been higher in the medical and scientific communities than it is now. For decades, this area of research was often relegated to the fringes of the clinical research community, while most mainstream academic research centers and Big Pharma companies focused on the design and testing of new biochemical therapies.

With the five-year overall survival rate among all patients with cancer approaching a record 65 percent, we have, unquestionably, made enormous improvement in our ability to cure many of the cancers that, not too long ago, were associated with a very high risk of death.

Despite that admirable progress, nearly 600,000 U.S. cancer patients will still succumb to their disease this year. Thus, more effective cancer prevention strategies are necessary to reduce the number of new cases of cancer, and more effective (and less toxic) cancer therapies must be identified.

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Because so-called “natural products” are relatively inexpensive, widely available, and generally non-toxic, there is a growing interest in studying these agents using the same high-level prospective, randomized clinical trials that are routinely used by pharmaceutical companies and academic medical centers to evaluate promising new drug therapies.

Until recently and most likely due to inherent biases against natural products by the mainstream clinical research community in the past, very little high-level clinical research has been performed to definitively evaluate natural products as disease prevention and treatment agents.

Fortunately, and despite shrinking research funding over the past decade, there has been a recent surge in the number of large randomized, prospective, controlled clinical research trials reporting their findings of the effects of natural products on disease prevention and treatment.

A newly published prospective, early-phase, clinical pilot study from Canada evaluated the effects of a soy beverage (“soy milk”) on the progression of recurrent prostate cancer in 29 men following radiation therapy for their cancers.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer that occurs in men (excluding minor skin cancers), and the second most common cause of cancer death. In 2009, an estimated 192,000 new cases of prostate cancer were diagnosed in the United States alone, and approximately 27,000 American men died of this disease in the same year.

This study, published in the journal “Nutrition and Cancer,” was not a placebo-controlled randomized study. However, this small phase II clinical study prospectively followed these patient volunteers for six months, during which time serial measurements of the level of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in their blood was performed. (PSA is the primaryprostate tumor marker that is measured both to detect early prostate cancer and to identify recurrences of this type of cancer.)

The time interval during which the level of PSA in the blood doubles is an important indicator of the rate of progression of recurrent prostate cancer. In this study, the consumption of approximately one quart (500 ml) of soy beverage per day, for six months, was associated with an actual decline in PSA levels in four (14 percent) of these patient volunteers, while another eight (28 percent) of these recurrent prostate cancer patients experienced a greater than 100 percent increase in their PSA doubling times. Another five patients (17 percent) experienced a 50 percent or greater improvement in their PSA doubling times during the six months of this study.

Whether or not longer durations of soy intake will be able to sustain the impressive results of this study is not clear at this time. More importantly, whether or not these observed favorable effects of daily soy intake on PSA levels and PSA doubling times will actually translate into prolonged survival (or not) is also unknown at this time.

It will require several larger and longer-term clinical trials of soy foods and soy isoflavone supplements to answer these critical questions (several of which are already underway).

Meanwhile, the overall safety profile for moderate amounts of soy intake in men appears to be quite favorable, and so many prostate cancer experts are cautiously recommending soy-derived foods for men with prostate cancer, and for men who are at an increased risk of developing prostate cancer, pending the completion of these larger prostate cancer research studies.